High Load Average

["Jordi S. Bunster" <jsb@nautilus.com.br>]

Just a question: Is there any reason in particular for a Debian
Box keep its load average always over 6?

It is a AMD Athlon 750 Mhz with 256 Megs of RAM, running potato
and 2.2.19, compiled to run on i686. It has the Patches Debian
puts on the stock kernel, and the new-style raid patches,
although no RAIDs are set up yet.

Sometimes the Load Average goes over 10, making sendmail refuse
connections. It is running sendmail, IMAP, POP3, apache+perl,
Radius(cistron) and that's it. What can possibly be wrong?

Sidenote: We had another similar machine (processor was a PIII
550 Mhz) running the same stuff, but with Slackware. Load was
never that high, and the machine swapped all the time, at least
25 Megs. The new Debian Box never swaps, but has a high load
always.


Any thoughts?


  Jordi S. Bunster
<jsb@nautilus.com.br>